The sun had risen before the crew of the ark finished their grim clearing of the decks and the skiff in which the outlaws had rowed out to attack the ark. There was no way of telling who had fired the shot which killed the notorious outlaw, on whose head a price of a thousand dollars had been fixed. Marion was in favor of burying him in the river with his two companions of the skiff, but Jimmy had the matter very much at heart.
“Just let me have his head,” pleaded that young savage. “If I can take his head to the fort I won’t ask them for the reward—honest, I won’t. But this Big Harp was
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just about the worst of the whole lot, and mebby if the others learn that he’s paid for his crimes they won’t be so venturesome. He was worse than the Indians.”
He spoke with so much emotion that Marion felt the force of his argument. If it became definitely proven that Big Harp had been delivered up to justice at the army post, it would make a great difference in the safety of the pioneers and rivermen. They—Big Harp and Little Harp, and John Mason—had been the leaders of a band of robbers, thirty or more in number, who for ten years were the terror of Ohio boatmen; they attacked “arks” and “keels” alike, and on several occasions had murdered the entire crew of the captured craft. Their actual headquarters had been Diamond Island, just below Henderson; but the caverns higher up the river made convenient lurking places, from which they could sally forth, or into which they could retreat secure from pursuit.
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Jimmy watched the captain anxiously. In the bright light of sunrise, Jimmy’s paint and feathers failed grotesquely to conceal the white man. His head had been shorn, all but the scalp and forelock, which were put up in a piece of tin, with a bunch of turkey feathers, while the feathers of at least two turkeys hung to the hair of his scalp.
“You’re a sight,” said Moses, as he gazed on these uncouth adornments, while Marion was making up his mind.
“I’d ’a been more of a sight if this Big Harp had had his way with me,” answered Jimmy, whose eyes never left the young captain’s face. “He wanted to cut off my ears and eyelids because I wouldn’t tell him exactly when the ark would sail from Fish Creek. Only for Logan—the one I went away with from my cabin—he would have done it, too. Logan was a pretty good friend to me because I helped him to get
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away when he had a broken leg. He would have been caught and handed over to the authorities more than once if I hadn’t been along. He was pretty helpless. After he was killed by the Shawnees I lost my job, though, and as the robbers didn’t have any agricultural employment for me (they said that that was all I was fit for, because I wouldn’t turn pirate), they took my gun away from me and launched me in a canoe that happened to be hauled up in a creek where we camped. There was a dead Shawnee lying by it; and, before they let me go, Big Harp and that one-eyed fellow that you dumped out of the skiff just now, thought it would be fun to decorate me with his head-dress, so that I shouldn’t miss the clothes they took from me. Those outlaws actually lost a good hour fixing me up, and then put me into the canoe and shoved me off and told me I could go on and join my father at the Chickasaw Bluffs,
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and maybe he’d recognize me by the resemblance between us. They wouldn’t give me even a day’s rations. Big Harp said the ark would be along and that you’d take me in.”
Jimmy told these things stolidly, without laying any particular stress on them until he came to the way in which Big Harp and his gang had amused themselves by making him into a feathered object of derision before launching him on the river without food and with no more covering than the dead savage had worn. His voice trembled with rage when he told of that, and Moses, who was always the first to feel any strong emotion in those around him, and to respond to it, shut his fists passionately.
“I wish we could kill them over again,” Mose ejaculated. “We killed ’em too easy. They had ought to have hung.”
Jimmy looked at him. It was the first
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moment he had taken his somber eyes off of Marion since he had asked for the outlaw’s head.
“Yes, Mose,” he said, “even hanging would have been too good for ’em.”
“How did they get hold of you again?” asked Marion.
“I drifted for two days and nights before I could get ashore,” said Jimmy, taking up his story where he had left off. “They weren’t able to find the paddle that the dead Indian had had, or else they had hidden it themselves, so I had nothing to control the canoe with, and I couldn’t get to shore.”
“Why didn’t you drop overboard and swim for it?” asked Lewis.
“In that ice water, with that current and no knowing how long it would take me? You couldn’t swim in the river, even to-day, for fifteen minutes, without doubling up with a cramp and going down! What’s
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the use of asking me a fool question like that?”
“Yes,” added Moses, “what do you want to go interrupting him for?”
“You’re interrupting just as much yourself,” retorted Lewis.
Jimmy smiled at them, and then went on addressing Marion. “You get mighty hungry when you’ve been floating down the river two or three days. Finally, I paddled with my hands into a creek into which the water had backed up considerably. It was along about sundown, I reckon. There were some men working on board an ark—not as big as this, and not very much more than just decked over. They were hammering so hard, trying to get all they could done before night, most likely, that they didn’t hear me shout to them, but went right on working while I got my canoe beached and started to ’em. I had to pick my way through the blackberry bushes
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and grapevines that grew thick along the creek, and I was so sick from hunger that I expect I sort of crept towards ’em, wondering if I’d have strength to get to them before they stopped work and went home, and if I’d have strength left to shout when they stopped hammering. I was so glad to see honest men that that made me sort of sick, too. I’d ’a’ been pearter if it had been Indians or outlaws. But, just the thought that I was in sight of friends made me tremble so I couldn’t scarcely stand up. I never remembered my head-dress. When I was in the canoe I kept it on because I thought if I passed any Indians they wouldn’t notice me so much, and when I got into the creek and saw the white men I forgot everything except to try to get to them as quick as I knew how.”
“Did they fire at you?” exclaimed Moses.
“Fire? They fired the minute they
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clapped eyes on my head-dress over the bushes. They didn’t wait to see the color of the rest of me. The minute they fired I understood, but it was too late. Some Indians who were passing by ran in on them before they’d time to load again, and scalped the whole outfit, and took me captive. They were pleased to death with my decorations—I don’t know why; and they made a sort of mascot of me, except that I had to carry the loads, when we traveled, and they showed me by signs that I’d have to do squaw’s work when we got to camp. They fed me like themselves, but I was too faint to eat their sort of cooking; and you would be, too, if you had seen the way they cooked. Then I showed them I wanted to cook for myself, and they let me do it to get back my strength. I reckon it must have been a week. I didn’t keep track of time, and we didn’t go near any settlements. One night we camped in
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the mouth of a cave near the river. It was raining, and it had been raining all day. I expect I was feverish and my head was flighty, for I got an idea into it that I’d find the other mouth of the cave, which very likely overlooked the river, and sit in it and wait for you to come by in the ark. It was a little past the first quarter, and I thought it had been the last quarter of the moon when I left my cabin with Logan. You see I was mixed, but I thought I had it all clearly reasoned out. So I wandered off into the cave.”
“Did the Indians chase you?” asked Moses.
“No,” said Jimmy, “I don’t reckon they did. They had too much sense, probably, after they’d found how far in I’d gone. They hadn’t any idea of getting lost themselves. That cave was a hundred caves, all partitioned off and running in and out of each other. I expect I pretty near
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died in them. All I remember is creeping and crawling along on my hands and knees most of the time, half the time in the water and half the time out, and then I went sort of crazy and beat against the rocks and screamed until the whole cavern mocked and mocked me. The next thing I knew I was lying on blankets in a cave that was fitted up as a hiding-place, and I learned that my rescuers were part of Big Harp’s gang. When Big Harp and the rest came, they were so amused they couldn’t do enough for me. They said they had come down to meet you folks, and that I should lead the party.”
“How did you come to have the letter to write the warning on?” asked Moses, whose imagination had supplied the rest of the story, and run ahead of the narrator.
“Big Horn wasn’t a good reader,” said Jimmy, “and I had been given the letter, to make out what he couldn’t make out for
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himself. Big Horn thought it said something about the Governor sending some money by the brig that was to leave Marietta with the ‘fresh,’ and he thought it might be more worth while to make sure of the brig than to capture you fellows. But when he learned that the word that he thought was ‘money’ was ‘militia,’ he lost interest in the letter, and they decided not to wait very long for you folks. If you hadn’t come in a day or two, they would have gone back further into the caves until the brig was safely past.”
“I suppose,” said Lincoln, “that the ark we passed, where the men were scalped, was the place where you were captured.”
Jimmy looked absently at Lincoln. “I guess that’s about all,” he said to Marion. “Big Harp warned me, when we attacked you, that if I turned on any of the gang he and the rest of his crowd would avenge themselves on any of you they captured, if
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they got the best of the fight. That’s why I didn’t kill any of them when the fight began.”
“That’s why you pitched into me?” asked Moses, in a sympathetic voice.
“Yes,” said Jimmy. “I didn’t want to seem to be idling.” He fixed Marion with his steady, dogged eyes. “Now, may I have Big Harp’s head to take to the commandant at Natchez?”
Marion looked from one to another of the arksmen.
“Yes!” they shouted.
“Yes,” said Marion.
Cutler’s body was buried that evening on a wooded eminence of Cumberland Island, overlooking the Ohio and opposite the mouth of the Cumberland River. Many such solitary graves double-line the banks of these great water-ways—the unmarked resting places of victims of savage hate, or outlaw violence and robbery.
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Later, in the night, the ark passed Diamond Island, so long the home of the river pirates. It loomed beside them, safe, silent, wooded, wrapped in peace.
The next morning they were floating across the broad mouth of the Tennessee River, nearly half as wide as the Ohio itself............